Acropolis Remapped: on a Democratic Politics of Resistance

Abstract

In 2010, forty-eight years after Jerzy Grotowski's iconic 1962 performance of Stanisław Wyspiański's Akropolis, Greek director Michael Marmarinos presented to the Athenian audience Acropolis: Reconstruction. In his homage to the Polish director, Marmarinos asked the question that Grotowski (and Wyspiański before him) had raised: what is the contemporary Acropolis? Marmarinos’s Acropolis observes the ruins of contemporary Athens; frustrations, tensions and other dramaturgies of the crisis that was beginning to transform the urban fabric of the Greek capital. In this article, I map the in-crisis restructuring of Athens in dialogue with Acropolis: Reconstruction. Employing Deleuze’s idea of a ‘minor or minimising treatment’ of the classics, I examine the becoming-ruins of monuments in a city in crisis, by searching for the contemporary acropolises not in the ruins upon the hill (the remains of classical Athens and the symbol of its democracy) but in the ruins in its shadow.

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The development of the eJournals Platform took place within the project "National Information System for Research & Technology/Social Networks-User Generated Content" (Project ID 296115). The project is implemented by the National Documentation Centre within the Operational Programme "Digital Convergence" (NSFR), which is co-funded by Greece and the European Union-European Regional Development Fund.